You’ll Never Believe What I’m About to Tell You…

Opening lines are critical hooks at the Falling Walls Lab – an opportunity to grab your audience and kick off your 180 seconds with a bang. Here’s a smattering of some of the more arresting first lines heard throughout the day:

“Please take a deep breath and inhale.” – Johannes Bintinger

“My name is Joanne and I’m a kleptomaniac.” – Joanne Duffy

“It’ll be my pleasure to tell you more about how not to waste your urine.” – Bastian Etter

“Do you have a bad habit?” – Gordon Feld

“Last year we used 20 million liters of biofuel.” – Tsufang Hong

“I’m going to ask you a question that I’m pretty sure no one has asked you before: When was the last time you checked your brain?” – Assaf Horowitz

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Jeffrey Marlow is a Contributing Writer at Discover Magazine, where he authors the Extremo Files blog focusing on microbiology. He is also a Geobiologist postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University, where he studies deep-ocean microbiology and methane-based metabolism.